Commentaries on current events, political economy, and the Communist movement from a Marxist-Leninist perspective.
Zigedy highly recommends the Marxist-Leninist website, MLToday.com, where many of his longer articles appear.

Search This Blog

Thursday, December 28, 2017

In the throes of the
2007-2008 economic collapse, I projected that the global economy
would be irrevocably and qualitatively marred by the unfolding
events. I foresaw a shift in the structure of international
relations, a shift away from the so-called “globalization”
interlude. Writing in November of 2008:

The
economic crisis has reversed the post-Soviet process of international
integration – so-called "globalization." As with the
Great Depression, the economic crisis strikes different economies in
different ways. Despite efforts to integrate the world economies, the
international division of labor and the differing levels of
development foreclose a unified solution to economic distress. The
weak efforts at joint action, the conferences, the summits, etc.
cannot succeed simply because every nation has different interests
and problems, a condition that will only become more acute as the
crisis mounts.

A crisis of the severity
of 2007-2008 understandably challenges some earlier verities, but
more importantly, it renders some economic roads now impassable. My
view was that the era of completely open, free, and secure
international exchange fueling dramatic growth in trade was not a new
stage of capitalism-- as many wished to argue-- but a phase created
by politically contingent factors and spurred by the intensified
international competition of the last thirty years of the twentieth
century. Moreover, that phase-- unhelpfully called “globalization”--
was both fortuitous and disastrous for the fate of capitalism. I
elaborated on this further in April of 2009:

To
simplify greatly, a healthy, expanding capitalist order tends to
promote intervals of global cooperation – enforced by a hegemonic
power – and trade expansion, while a wounded, shrinking capitalist
order tends towards autarky and economic nationalism. The Great
Depression was a clear example of heightened nationalism and economic
self-absorption. Most commentators acknowledge this fact, but
attribute it to the predilections of national leaders. It was said
that Roosevelt “sabotaged” the London Economic Conference, for
example. Earlier, he said: “Our international trade relations,
though vastly important, are in point of time and necessity secondary
to the establishment of a sound economy.” It is my contention, and
I believe essential to a Marxist understanding, that Roosevelt’s
reaction was an expression of the logic of capitalism under stress;
the structural development that led to intense nationalism throughout
Europe, especially in Germany and Italy, and ultimately to war.

The stress of the
2007-2008 economic collapse created “centrifugal forces,” forces
pulling apart the institutions, the regulations, and the commitment
to an open, unified, and universal global marketplace. In its place
would come a growing national partisanship, a commitment to
winning-against-adversaries, rather than partnership. This process of
“de-globalizing,” of going it alone would gain against both the
process and ideology of economic integration.

I believe these
projections have been borne out. My February, 2017 articleNew Developments in Political Economy: The
Demise of “Globalization”, makes the case
that the trade internationalism of the post-Soviet era is in profound
decline. Moreover, emergent and growing nationalism enjoys its
vitality from the reaction to the failure of the global order. Events
in the months since the article appear only to underscore that
claim.

Rising
Economic Nationalism

President Trump has
substantially called the World Trade Organization (WTO) irrelevant to
US trade policies. But skepticism about the WTO precedes his
political rise as a nationalist. The once heralded WTO Doha (Doha
Development Agenda) was mired in dispute and ineffectiveness from its
inception in 2001 and especially after 2008. The annual number of WTO
trade disputes has more than doubled since 2008 even though trade
growth has been tepid (below global GDP growth for the last 3 years),
a sure sign of growing protectionist sentiments. The recent December
10-13 meeting of the WTO was largely a failure. “The trade body’s
164 members didn’t reach full consensus on any of the major
objectives it had set itself before the meeting,” in the words of
Bloomberg’s Bryce Baschuk and Charlie Devereux, with the EU
blaming failure on “destructive behavior by several large
countries.”

But the European Union
(EU) is itself enduring a burst of economic nationalism. While the
popular press and liberal pundits stress the role of xenophobia in
Brexit, the economic ills that fueled the growth of nationalism in
the UK vote against EU membership are largely neglected. Also, the
breadth of the rejection of open market policies throughout the EU
are largely missed.

A recent The Wall
Street Journal article (12-14-17) affirms my projections made in
2008 and 2009 for the EU:

The financial crisis that
erupted in 2008 caused a drop in trade between EU countries, with
little rebound since beyond precrisis levels. As Europe’s swoon
dragged on, many politicians strove to prop up their economies with
fixes that prioritized domestic markets over the EU. (The EU, a
Disciple of Free Trade, is Erecting Barriers)

The WSJ author,
Valentina Pop, choses the example of Emmanuel Macron, the new French
President, to highlight the trend in the EU. Macron ran for office as
a passionate advocate for Europeanism and free markets. Nonetheless,
he nationalized a shipyard to block its purchase by an Italian firm,
he supports limiting foreign employment, and he “gutted” dairy
imports from EU countries. Further evidence for the retreat from
border-free markets and the embrace of nationalism comes from the
growth of trade barriers: legal actions against violators of the EU
market openness more than tripled last year.

Earlier this year, the
European commission moved legally against Romania and Hungary and, in
June, against Poland over economic disputes.

Nothing shows the fraying
of the one-global-market consensus and the turn to economic
nationalism more than the dispute escalating between the US and
Canada and waged though their corporate surrogates, Bombardier and
Boeing. Boeing lodged a complaint against Canadian aircraft firm
Bombardier with the US Commerce Department. With typical US
arrogance, Commerce slapped a 300% tariff on Bombardier planes sold
in the US.

Indignantly, the Canadian
government cancelled its plan to purchase $5.2 billion of new Boeing
fighters to supplement its existing Boeing fighter jets. Instead, it
will accept bids in 2019 for a purchase of 88 new fighters, but with
the pointed caveat that any bidder causing injury to Canada’s
interests would be disadvantaged, a not very subtle slap at Boeing.

Further, as Canada grows
increasingly unhappy with renegotiations over NAFTA, the government
has turned to the People's Republic of China (PRC) to craft an
alternative free-trade agreement (Canadian merchandise exports to the
PRC have more than doubled since 2007). Clearly, one of history’s
oldest and most intimate trading partnerships is under increasing
stress from economic nationalism.

Elsewhere,
I have demonstrated the qualitative changes in global energy markets,
along with the dramatic intensification of competition and associated
hostilities. The shifting energy alliances, the swings in market
share, and the political instabilities that are commonplace have
spurred the turn to economic nationalism.

What does
it Mean?

The
hasty conclusion that expansion of global markets along with
universal homage to a new global community constituted an
irreversible change in capitalist relations is now thoroughly
discredited by the realities of imperialist aggression and economic
crisis. In fact, the “globalization” moment coincided with the
vast inclusion of new economies – the former socialist community –
and the absolute hegemony of a capitalist power – the US. History
has known other moments, but theorists – including many on the left
– were too awed by capitalist triumphalism, drawn to knee jerk
anti-Communism, and desirous of facile answers to recognize this
continuity with the logic of state-monopoly capitalism. Well before
World War I, a similar moment occurred with the massive expansion of
markets under the global hegemony of the British Empire, a period
followed by economic decline spurring extreme nationalism.

As I stress in the above
passage,
written in 2009, the normal course of global economic relations in
the era of state monopoly capitalism is intense competition, pressure
on profitability, accumulation crises, rising nationalism, and
conflict. This is the norm in the age of imperialism. This is the
logic of late capitalism.

Appearances may suggest to
some a different narrative-- enduring prosperity in the mid-twentieth
century, peace guaranteed by economic internationalism at the turn of
the new century-- but the reality is different, far different.
Reality is imposed by crisis. And the upheaval of 2007-2008 exposed
the reality of fierce competition and national self-interest.

For some, the rise of
nationalism is strictly a political phenomenon anchored in demagogy
and ignorance; they see no linkage with the course of capitalism. But
the economic base for this phenomenon cannot be denied. Liberal
markets produced the crisis and the resulting human suffering sparked
a political response.

And ruling classes, faced
with pressure on profits from increasingly desperate and cut-throat
competition in the unprecedented slow-growth recovery, are inexorably
driven towards economic nationalism. While economic nationalism is a
natural fit with the far right’s ultra-patriotism, it attracts
centrist forces as well. Elements of the US trade union movement and
Democratic industrial state politicians have warmed to economic
nationalism since the days of bashing Japanese imports. Liberal
Senators like Sherrod Brown have quietly worked with President Trump
around overturning trade deals like NAFTA-- “strange
bedfellows” in the words of The Wall
Street Journal.

We do not have to press
the parallel too hard to recognize that the economic nationalism of
today threatens to spark disastrous wars, as did the rabid economic
nationalism of the European powers in the prelude to World War I (and
World War II). As in both eras, hostility and tensions are
smoldering. And as in that era, war promises to follow, with
devastation well beyond the comprehension of a complacent,
self-absorbed population. The threat of general war, nuclear war, is
possibly greater than any time in my lifetime, excepting the early
Cold War years of General Curtis “Dr. Strangelove” LeMay and the US
nuclear monopoly.

While extreme right
nationalism is a serious political danger, the rise of economic
nationalism, a growing policy consensus with capitalist rulers,
threatens the very existence of millions, if not the planet.

Saturday, December 16, 2017

Some fifty years ago, ruling elites
throughout the capitalist world settled into their overstuffed chairs
and poured drinks to celebrate victory over the aspirations for
independence held dear by formerly colonial peoples. In one case--
Ghana-- a popular leader, a venerated leader of African independence
and African unity-- was deposed in a 1966 coup sponsored by foreign
powers and carried out by national traitors. In the other case--
Guyana-- the most popular political party for decades, the most
determined advocate for independence, was subverted and defeated in
the rigged elections prior to the 1966 granting of formal
independence.

Both Ghana and Guyana were long
subjected to colonial rule, Ghana as part of Britain’s African
colonial possessions and Guyana as part of the British empire’s
Caribbean colonies. As pressures for independence mounted after the
Second World War, both countries spawned dedicated and diligent
leaders who had earned the trust of the people. Kwame Nkrumah and his
Convention People’s Party (CPP) and Cheddi Jagan and his People’s
Progressive Party (PPP) had led their respective country’s fight
for independence from the beginning, suffering imprisonment, threats,
and trials.

Nkrumah and Jagan shared another
characteristic as well, a characteristic that made them the pressing
target of imperialism: a vision of social development outside of the
confinement of capitalism. They knew that centuries of capitalist
exploitation proved that escaping colonial domination would require a
parallel break with capitalism and its institutions. In fact, Nkrumah
wrote a pioneering work on the inevitable economic subjugation of
newly liberated peoples who chose to continue on the capitalist road,
Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism. Kwame Nkrumah’s
work was both brilliant in its application of Marxism and prescient
in anticipating the lingering dependency of the former colonies that
choose to remain tangled in the capitalist web.

Dark Days in Ghana

In his 1968 book (Dark Days in
Ghana) recounting the circumstances of the coup, Nkrumah noted
that many forces were arrayed against his programs from the day of
formal independence in 1957. Nonetheless, he and his party were able
to implement initiatives to rapidly bring social, cultural, and
educational achievements to a high level. By 1961, technical and
secondary school enrollment had increased 437.8% and university
students 478.8% from pre-independence. In the same period, hospital
beds had increased 159.9% and doctors and dentists by 220.5%. Roads
increased around 50%, telephones 245.2%, and electrical power
generated 38.4%. Ghana had achieved the highest per capita standard
of living and highest literacy rate in Africa. And Ghana’s Seven
Year Plan was to create a dramatic increase in industry, building
upon the increased electrification flowing from the country’s
massive Volta dam project.

But Ghana could only move forward if it
escaped the raw material trap that nearly all former colonies
suffered as the legacy of colonialism and dependency. For Cuba, it
was sugar cane, for Chile it was copper, for Guyana, it was bauxite,
and for Ghana it was cocoa. Today, of course in Venezuela it is
oil. In every case, the colony existed in the past only as a
supplier of inexpensive raw materials for the industries of the
European colonizers.

In the late 1950s the international
price of cocoa rose inordinately. Nkrumah’s party shrewdly taxed
the growers to utilize the surplus for social advancement,
stabilizing the cost of food and other consumer goods, and supporting
the diversification of the Ghanaian economy. But by 1965 the price
had collapsed, thus fueling the popular discontent sparked by the
enemies of socialism. Raw material prices in the international market
became a weapon against socialist development. The parallel with
modern day Venezuela, the collapse of oil prices, and the escalation
of opposition on all fronts cannot be missed. The economic
hardships in Ghana were skillfully transformed into violence. In
Nkrumah’s words:

An all-out
offensive is being waged against the progressive, independent states.
Where the more subtle methods of economic pressure and political
subversion have failed to achieve the desired result, there has been
a resort to violence in order to promote a change of regime and
prepare the way for the establishment of a puppet government.

In addition to manipulating the price
of cocoa exports (and Ghana’s import prices of finished goods
necessary for industrialization), “..imperialism withheld
investment and credit guarantees from potential investors, put
pressure on existing providers of credit to the Ghanaian economy, and
negated applications for loans made by Ghana to American-dominated
financial institutions such as the I.M.F.”

By way of self-criticism, Nkrumah
reflects:

We expected
opposition to our development plans from the relics of the old
“opposition”, from the Anglophile intellectuals and professional
elite, and of course from neo-colonists… What we did not perhaps
anticipate sufficiently was the backsliding of some of our own party
members… who for reasons of personal ambition, and because they
only paid lip-service to socialism, sought to destroy the Party.

Corruption proved to be a major problem
in Ghana, as it does in every former colony, every emerging nation.
The lack of robust democratic institutions-- denied by colonial and
neo-colonial domination-- inevitably produces a corrosive contempt
for the common good. Nor do the colonial masters leave proper
mechanisms for reining in corruption after they reluctantly accepted
independence. Countries like Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina that
choose the path of national independence are plagued by this
conundrum.

Of course, it is the security services
of the imperialist countries that plant the seeds of reaction,
nourish the seeds, and organize the harvest. In Ghana, they stirred
secessionist sentiments of people in Ashanti, Togoland, and the
Northern region. Previously, they had used the secessionist forces in
Katanga to destabilize Congo and overthrow the patriot Patrice
Lumumba. In our time, ethnic and religious differences were stoked
in the former Yugoslavia and throughout the Middle East, including
Iraq, Libya, and Syria to destabilize independent governments.

And the monopoly media in the
capitalist countries unified around the joint themes that Nkrumah was
an unpopular “dictator” and his government was entirely too close
to the socialist countries, particularly the Soviet Union. In the
aftermath of the coup, a sham event was contrived to demonstrate
Nkrumah’s unpopularity.

Much publicity was
given in the imperialist press and on T.V., to the pulling down of
the statue of myself in front of the National Assembly building in
Accra. It was made to appear as angry crowds had torn the statue from
its pedestal...But it was not for nothing that no photographs could
be produced to show the actual pulling down of the statue… In fact
when the statue was pulled down… no unauthorized person was allowed
into the area. All those who were there at the time were those
brought in by the military… Even the jubilant imperialist press
evidently saw nothing strange in publishing photographs of bewildered
toddlers, tears running down their checks sitting on a headless
statue, while the same imperialist press extolled what it described
as a “most popular coup”.

One cannot miss the parallel,
thirty-seven years later, with the contrived, but dramatic
overturning of the statue of Saddam Hussein in Firdos Square, a
staged media extravaganza engineered by US authorities to demonstrate
Saddam’s unpopularity.

In retrospect, Nkrumah asserts:

In fact, the fault
was that, from the very circumstances in which we found ourselves, we
were unable to introduce more “dangerous ideas”... What went
wrong in Ghana was not that we attempted to have friendly relations
with the countries of the socialist world but that we maintained too
friendly relations with the countries of the western bloc.

The champions of national independence,
especially the advocates for socialism need to heed this lesson,
embracing those “dangerous ideas” that drive the revolutionary
process forward, strengthening the hand of the revolutionaries and
weakening the hand of the opposition. Backtracking and accommodation
are not options.

The West on Trial

If Nkrumah’s Ghana is an example of
the engineered coup sponsored by imperialism and its toadies, if the
1966 coup is a repeat of Iran in 1953 and a precursor of Chile in
1973, then the rigged election in Guyana was the prototype for the
so-called “color revolutions” sponsored by the US and its allies
in the period since the demise of European socialism.

As the leading figure in the post-war
independence struggle of what was then the colony known as British
Guiana, Cheddi Jagan soon realized that aspirations for independence
were thwarted not only by the British administration, but more
decisively by the US government. After his party’s sweeping victory
in the 1953 House of Assembly elections, the British sent troops and
suspended the colonial constitution out of hysterical fear of a
Marxist takeover.

Writing in his post-mortem account, The
West on Trial: The Fight for Guyana’s Freedom, Jagan noted:
“…the main cause, I believe, for the suspension of our
constitution was pressure from the government of the United States…
We were not surprised, therefore that the US government gave its
blessing to the British gunboat diplomacy… Ostensibly, the United
States was urging the colonial powers to grant independence to
colonial territories. But in reality, the independence was nothing
more than the nominal transfer of powers to those who either
conformed or showed signs of conforming to US policies.”

From the 1961 elections, where Jagan’s
PPP won its third consecutive election, gaining 20 of 35 seats, until
formal independence on May 26, 1966, the US poured millions of
dollars into every imaginable plan to erode the popular support of
the PPP. The opposition promised huge investments and loans that
would be forthcoming with a pro-capitalist government. The opposition
boycotted or refused to collaborate with any and all development
programs or social measures, including a budget.

The capitalist media echoed the
opposition with a shrill anti-Communist campaign. “All of this was
written at a time when it is alleged that we had destroyed the
freedom of the press! We did not own our own daily newspaper to
counter the distortions and lies of the press. This is a problem
which confronts all national governments interested in change,”
Jagan remarked.

Violence was sparked and fanned by the
opposition, loudly labelling the PPP “authoritarian.” Racialism
between African-origin and Indian-origin Guyanese was stoked. The US
labor movement’s infamous AIFLD (a collaboration with the CIA)
fomented strikes built upon lies and distortions.

Well-connected US columnist Drew
Pearson, writing in March of 1964 explained the US involvement:

The United States
permitted Cuba to go Communist purely through default and diplomatic
bungling. The problem now is to look ahead and make sure we don’t
make the same mistake again… in British Guiana, President Kennedy,
having been badly burnt in the Bay of Pigs operations, did look
ahead.

Though it was not
published at the time, this was the secret reason why Kennedy took
his trip to England in the summer of 1963… [It was] only because of
Kennedy’s haunting worry that British Guiana would get its
independence in July, 1963, and set up another Communist government
under the guidance of Fidel Castro.

…[T]he main
thing they agreed on was that the British would refuse to grant
independence to Guiana because of the general strike against
pro-Communist Prime Minister, Cheddi Jagan.

The strike was
secretly inspired by a combination of US Central Intelligence money
and British intelligence. [A]nother Communist government at the
bottom of the one-time American lake has been temporarily stopped.

Pearson acknowledges the massive and
determined campaign of destabilization that culminated in a
US-sponsored coalition of US-friendly parties edging out the PPP in a
calculated, delayed independence. The orchestrated campaign of rumor,
lies, and promises was whipped into a powerful counterforce to a
popular, independent government. In this regard, Guyana was not
different from the many so-called “color revolutions” that are
brought to a boil by heavily foreign-funded, non-government
organizations. The Defunct AIFLD has been supplanted by Solidarity Center, USAID, the
National Endowment for Democracy, the Republican and Democratic
Institutes, and myriad other acronymic NGOs that serve US foreign
policy in a government-funded, surreptitiously government-funded, or
privately funded fashion. Their footprints are all over Georgia,
Ukraine, and a host of other countries targeted by US foreign policy.

Lessons from the Past

It should be crystal clear that there
is nothing new in the meddling of the US and its allies (and other
imperialist centers) in the trajectory of smaller, less powerful
countries; neo-colonialism and imperialism are the dominant forms of
late monopoly capitalism. Nkrumah details twenty interventions in the
affairs of African states alone between December 1962 and March 1967.
From the Greek war of national liberation in the aftermath of the
Nazi defeat to the latest CIA move, the latest sanction, the latest
military threat, the US, in particular, has been promoting and
forcing dependency at the expense of the national sovereignty of the
peoples.

But lessons can be drawn from the long,
difficult struggle for national independence, a history of great
sacrifice, fierce and selfless battle, but treachery as well. Nkrumah
was right: The only absolute guarantee of national independence is to
break the chains to capitalism, to choose the path to socialism.
Among the best examples of success are the Democratic Republic of
Vietnam (DRV), Cuba, and the Democratic People's Republic of Korea
(DPRK), all small nations defying the most lethal power ever
assembled. When faced with the full brunt of imperialist aggression,
the three governments found resolve from their faith in working
people, their confidence that working people would unite and fight
for a clear, radical vision of social justice, and their refusal to
retreat even an inch from principle.

Moreover, borrowing Nkrumah’s words,
it is necessary to embrace and press “dangerous ideas,” most
necessarily, the idea of command of the state by the agents of
change; independence is not possible with the enemies of independence
nested in the state.

Nkrumah prefaced his book with excerpts
from a letter to him from Richard Wright, the expatriate US author.
Wright’s complex, often contradictory relations with progressive
movements did not deter him from writing with a feverish intensity:

I say to you
publicly and frankly. The burden of suffering that must be borne,
impose it upon one generation! ...Be merciful by being stern!
If I lived under your regime, I’d ask for this hardness, this
coldness…

Make no mistake,
Kwame, they are going to come at you with words about democracy; you
are going to be pinned to the wall and warned about decency;
plump-faced men will mumble academic phrases about “sound”
development; men of the cloth will speak unctuously of values and
standards; in short, a barrage of concentrated arguments will be
hurled at you to persuade you to temper the pace and drive of your
movement…

And as you launch
your bold programmes, as you call on your people for sacrifices, you
can be confident that there are free men beyond the continent of
Africa who see deeply enough into life to know and understand what
you must do, what you must impose…

Thursday, November 30, 2017

“Eradicating
the Bacillus”

In the US, the last few
months have seen a host of celebratory salutes to, tributes to, and
commentaries on the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. Serious research and
thought were reflected in many, reminding us of both the sacrifices and achievements made by the workers of many nationalities who
established the first sustained workers’ state, the USSR. Authors
and speakers touched on many aspects of the Revolution and its rich
legacy of fighting for socialism and ending imperialism.

Needless to say, little
(or none?) of the victories of twentieth century socialism spawned by
the Russian Revolution found its way into the monopoly media; the
fete for the Bolshevik Revolution was held on alternative websites,
by small circulation journals, and in small meeting halls and venues.
This would neither surprise nor disappoint Vladimir Lenin; rather, it
would conjure memories of the difficult and stubborn work of the
small, often disputatious Russian Social Democratic Party in the
years leading up to the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.

This doesn’t mean, of
course, that the mainstream capitalist media had no commentary on the
Russian Revolution. They did.

And it was relentlessly
and uniformly negative. No warm words of any kind were spared for
Russian workers of 1917 and their cause. In fact, in a year when the
media and its wealthy and powerful collaborators decided to resurrect
the spectre of Soviet Russia in a new, hysterical anti-Russia
campaign, moguls mounted a lurid, anti-Communist campaign unseen
since the Cold War.

The New York Times
unleashed their rabid neo-McCarthyite commentator (Communism
Through Rose-Colored Glasses), Bret Stephens, to spew his venom
and unsparingly and gratuitously denounce anyone that he could even
remotely connect with the Revolution, from those wearing “Lenin or
Mao T-shirts” to Lillian Hellman. Progressives, Jeremy Corbyn, and,
predictably, Bernie Sanders are condemned, part of the “bacillus”
yet to be “eradicated,” to reference his clumsy, vulgar
paraphrase of Winston Churchill. They, like any of us who find any
merit at all in the Soviet experience, are “fools, fanatics, or
cynics.”

Then there was the nutty
Masha Gessen-- the favorite of NPR’s resident bootlicker to wealthy
patrons, Scott Simon-- who analyzes the Soviet experience in a
strange brew of mysticism and psycho-babble. Even The Wall Street
Journal reviewer of her new book (The Future is History)
concedes that she “puts forth a[n]... argument full of psychospeak
about ‘energies’ and an entire society succumbing to depression.”
He goes on: “She begins with the dubious assertion that one of
Soviet society’s decisive troubles derived from the state
prohibition against sociology and psychoanalysis, which meant the
society ‘had been forbidden to know itself.’”

“Dubious” assertion?
Or whacky assertion?

But Gessen will always be
remembered for embracing the term “Homo Sovieticus,” a term that
will undoubtedly prove attractive to those mindlessly active in the
twitter universe.

For reviewing Gessen’s
book, reviewer Stephen Kotkin had the favor returned with a glowing
review in The Wall Street Journal of his book, Stalin:
Waiting for Hitler 1929-1941. Joshua Rubenstein-- himself the
author of another catalogue of Stalin’s evil, The Last Days of
Stalin-- engages the usual verbal histrionics: “despotism,”
“violent and catastrophic,” “ruthlessness and paranoia,”
“draconian,” “remarkable cruelty,” “calamitous,”
“crimes,” “ideological fanaticism.” These, and other shrill
descriptions, pile up in a mere ten paragraphs. Rubenstein clearly
reveals his anti-Soviet bias when he describes Soviet aid and
assistance to the elected Spanish anti-fascist government in 1936 as
an “intervention.” The interveners were the Italian and German
fascists; the Soviets were, unlike the Western “democracies,” the
only opponents of intervention.

Kotkin’s service to the
WSJ and the anti-Soviet cause were rewarded with a long op-ed
piece in the Journal in the weekend Review section
(November 4-5, 2017). The Princeton and Stanford professor tackled
the topic, The Communist Century, with great vigor. He sets
the tone with the dramatic claim that ...communism has claimed at
least 65 million lives, according to the painstaking research of
demographers.”

The victims-of-Communism
numbers game was elaborated and popularized by Robert Conquest, a
writer whose career overlapped on numerous occasions with the Cold
War propaganda efforts of the UK Information Research Department, the
US CIA, and the CIA’s publishing fronts. Conquest owned the
estimate of 20 million deaths from the Soviet purges of the late
1930s. At the height of the Cold War, this astounding figure met no
resistance from “scholars” at elite universities. Indeed, every
schoolgirl and schoolboy in the crazed, rabid 1950s “knew” of the
tens of millions of victims of Stalin’s purges.

Unfortunately for Conquest
(though he never acknowledged it) and the many lemming-like academic
experts, the post-Soviet archives revealed that his numbers were
vastly inflated. In fact, they had no relationship whatsoever to the
actualities of that nonetheless tragic period.

Kotkin’s claimed 65
million victims of Communist misdeeds should, accordingly, be taken
with less than a grain of salt, though it is curiously and
mysteriously well below the endorsed estimate of his mentor, Martin
Malia. Malia, the author of the preface to the infamous Black Book
of Communism (1994), endorsed that sensationalized book’s claim
that 94 million lives were lost to Communism. Some contributors to
the Black Book retracted this claim, noting that it was
arrived at by an obsession with approaching the magic number of 100
million victims. They subsequently “negotiated” (or manufactured)
a tally between 65 and 93 million. Such is the “rigor” of Soviet
scholarship at elite universities.

Kotkin, like most other
anti-Communist crusaders, gives away the numbers endgame, the purpose
behind blaming uncountable victims upon Communism. For the
arch-enemies of Communism like Conquest and the participants in the
Black Book, it is imperative that Communism be perceived as
equally evil with or more evil than Nazism and fascism. This charge
of moral equivalence is targeted at the liberals who might view
Communism as a benign ally in the defense of liberal values or social
reforms. No one has done more to promote this false equivalency than
Yale professor Timothy Snyder with his shoddy, ideologically driven
book, Bloodlands.

Of course, the Washington
Post also has its resident guardians of anti-Soviet dogma in Marc
Thiessen and the incomparable Anne Applebaum. Applebaum has enjoyed a
meteoric career from graduate student to journalist covering Eastern
European affairs to the widely acknowledged leader of anti-Soviet
witch-hunters. Her marriage to an equally anti-Communist Polish
journalist-turned-politician further strengthened her role as the
hardest charging of the hard-charging professional anti-Communists.
Her consistent work denouncing everything Soviet has earned her a
place on the ruling class Council of Foreign Relations and the CIA’s
“active measure,” the National Endowment for Democracy.

She
“celebrated” the Bolshevik Revolution on November 6 with a
several-thousand-word Washington Post essay raising the
feverish alarm of a return of Bolshevism (100 years later, Bolshevism
is back. And we should be worried.) Applebaum repeats a favorite
theme of the new generation of virulent anti-Communists: the events
of November 1917 were a coup d’etat and not a revolution. Of
course, this claim is hard to square with another favorite theme--
the Bolsheviks numbered only two to ten thousand followers. How do
you reconcile such a tiny group “overthrowing” the government and
the security forces of the fourth most populated empire in the world?

The Bolsheviks lied. Lenin
was a liar. Trotsky was a liar. “So were his comrades. The
Bolsheviks lied about the past… and they lied about the future,
too. All through the spring and summer of 1917, Trotsky and Lenin
repeatedly made promises that would never be kept.” Further,
Lenin’s henchmen used the “tactics of psychological warfare that
would later become their trademark” to mesmerize the population.
That same easily charmed population was to later fight for socialism
against counter-revolutionary domestic reaction and foreign
intervention in a bloody five-year war (1917-1922), the same supposedly easily
tricked population that laid down their arms and refused to fight for
the Czar or his “democratic” successors. This neat picture of
perfidy surely exposes a belief in both superhuman, mystical powers
possessed by Lenin and an utter contempt for the integrity and
intelligence of the Russian masses.

But it is not really the
historical Bolsheviks who are Applebaum’s target, but today’s
“neo-Bolsheviks.”

And who are the
“neo-Bolsheviks”?

For Ms. Applebaum, they
are everyone politically outside of her comfortable, insular world of
manners and upper-middle class conservatism. First and foremost, she
elects to smear the social democrats in Spain and Greece, along with
Jeremy Corbyn, who may consider “bringing back nationalization.”
Similarly, their US counterparts “on the fringes of the Democratic
Party” (Bernie Sanders!) are condemned because they embrace “a
dark, negative version of American history” and “spurn basic
patriotism and support America’s opponents, whether in Russia or
the Middle East.” (Sadly, my social democratic friends will likely
not allow these ravings to shake their confidence in Applebaum’s
equally inane pronouncements on Communism.)

But the “neo-Bolsheviks”
exist on the right as well! She identifies them as those rightists
who “scorn Christian Democracy, which had its political base in the
church and sought to bring morality back to politics…” “If
some of what these extremists [on the right] say is to be taken
seriously, their endgame-- the destruction of the existing political
order, possibly including the U.S. Constitution-- is one that the
Bolsheviks would have understood.” In Applebaum’s bizarre world,
there are Bolsheviks of both the left and right lurking under our beds! Safety is only found in the bosom of Christian democracy,
that post-war artifact cobbled together by the Western powers to
counter the parliamentary rise of Communism.

The anti-Communist
graffiti artists, the professional defacers of the Soviet legacy, are
legion. Books and commentaries by others, like Victor Sebestyen,
Serhii Plokhy, Douglas Smith, Svetlana Alexievich, Amy Knight, and
Catherine Merridale, join the authors reviewed here in churning out
new grist for the anti-Communist, anti-Soviet mill.

With many Soviet sources
now available, the practice of Cold War defamation has become a
riskier business, an enterprise possibly bringing embarrassment to
the most outrageous fabricators. Accordingly, the most sophisticated
among the new generation of Cold Warriors have turned in a new
direction: the 1930s famines in then Soviet Ukraine. With little risk
of exposure and eager cooperation from the virulently anti-Communist,
extreme nationalists now installed to govern Ukraine, they have
started a new victim-numbers race to rally the cause of
anti-Communism, a new narrative of Red wickedness.

Applebaum is right about
one thing. There is evil in the air.

But it is the vicious
slander of everything Red, especially the legacy of the Soviet Union.

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

A discussion of
“contradiction” as a Marxist technical term can become quite
tangled and obscure, particularly when the discussion proceeds to
Hegelian philosophy. But some clear and simple things can be said
about contradictions without delving deeply:

Marxists use the term
to indicate a conflict between elements, social forms, forces,
processes, or ideas that expresses a fundamental opposition rather
than a conflict that arises by accident or happenstance.

Contradictions are
not resolvable without an equally fundamental or qualitative change
in the antagonists or their relations (Mao Zedong, in his writings,
chooses to allow for conflicts [“contradictions”] that are
non-antagonistic as well).

Thus, the conflict between
dominating and dominated social classes (the capitalists and the
working class, for example) represents a contradiction since
opposition is fundamental to the nature of the classes and cannot be
resolved without a radical and qualitative change in their relations.
The dominated class must become dominant or it must eliminate the
relationship of domination.

In Marxist revolutionary
theory, the class contradiction is the most important contradiction,
the contradiction that informs social analysis and socialist
strategy.

But other contradictions
exist in capitalist society, in politics, in economics, in culture,
in foreign policy, and in virtually every aspect of life under
capitalism. When class contradictions become particularly acute, they
manifest in the sharpening of contradictions in every other aspect of
the dominant social form. When the contradictions, the underlying
conflicts, result in dysfunctionality, Marxists recognize a systemic
crisis.

Contradictions Abound!

Today, in the US, in the
wake of the greatest economic downturn since the Crash of 1929,
contradictions are found in every aspect of public life. The
increasingly apparent class contradiction is exemplified by growing
inequality, poverty, and social chaos. The explosive opioid epidemic
(recognized only because it has crossed the racial and class
“railroad tracks”) generates initiatives from all factions of
bourgeois politics. Pundits cry out for punitive action or enhanced
social service support, sometimes both. But they fail to locate the
causes of the epidemic, causes that are located under the surface of
bourgeois society. They fail to recognize that desperate acts
accompany desperate circumstances. Wherever poverty and social
alienation increase, anti-social, harmful behavior rises as well.

The contradiction between
a brutal, uncaring, social regimen and the most fragile, the most
marginalized people is as old as class society and the thirst for
wealth. The economic ravage of the small towns and cities scattered
across the Midwest attest to this contradiction. Capitalists
exploited the workers for their labor until they could wring no
further profit; then they tossed them aside and left them with no
good jobs and no hope. Crime and other destructive behaviors will
only increase, unless the contradiction is resolved with a departure
from the profit-based system, an alternative profoundly alien to the
two major political parties.

They, too, are fraught
with contradictions. Both the Democratic and Republican Parties score
low in poll approval (see, for example, CNN Poll: Views of DemocraticParty hit lowest mark in 25 years); since 2008, both have failed to
advance their programs even when enjoying complete legislative and
executive dominance (2009-2010, 2017-); and both parties are
afflicted with dissension and division.

The fundamental
contradiction in US politics arises from the fact that the two
dominant political organizations, the Democratic and Republican
Parties, are capitalist parties, yet they pretend to represent the
interests of the 70-80% of the US population that have nothing in
common with the capitalist class and its loyal servants. While the
two parties have skillfully posed as popular while unerringly serving
elites, the economic crisis, endless wars, and growing inequality
have unmasked their duplicity.

Consequently, factions
have broken out in both parties. The Republicans have sought to
contain the nativists and racists, the religious zealots, and the
isolationists and nationalists within the party while maintaining a
corporate agenda. The Democrats have similarly attempted to hold the
social liberals, the neo-New Dealers, the social democrats, the
environmentalists, and the minorities in a party fundamentally wedded
to promoting capitalism and market solutions. Neither strategy can
escape the contradictions inherent in a system of two capitalist
parties.

The Tea Party movement,
Trump, and the Bannonites threaten to shatter the Republican Party.
The slick corporate Republicans have lost their magic, unloading
vitriol on the vulgar, crass Trump, who deviates from the corporate
consensus. The Republican infighting exposes the damage in the party.

The Democrats are exposed
as well by the fissure between the Sanders followers and those who
are so fearful of working people and wholly beholden to Wall Street
and corporate money that they can’t even co-exist with Sanders’
mild reformism. The schism is so great that fundraising has nearly
collapsed. And the revelations of DNC collusion with Clinton’s
campaign confirmed by Donna Brazile, a long-time ranking insider, demonstrate
the rigid, undemocratic nature of the organization. The fact that
Brazile also improperly fed debate questions to Clinton only serves
to highlight the corruption of the Party and its leaders.

While both Parties are
expert at diversion and deflection, the depth of the political
crisis, the sharpness of the contradictions, have generated levels of
hypocrisy and hysteria unseen since the height of the Cold War. After
the debacle of the Clinton Presidential campaign, the Democrats, in
collusion with many elements of the security services and most of the
monopoly media, mounted a shrill anti-Russia campaign. Crudely, they
have relied on the emotional remnants of anti-Sovietism to lodge a
host of unsubstantiated charges and a campaign of
guilt-by-association. To anyone awake over the last half century or
so, the charge of “meddling in the US election” is laughable for
its hypocrisy. Have we forgotten Radio Free Europe or Radio Marti? Or
a host of other examples?

The high flyers of the
stock market-- the social media giants-- added ridiculous claims of
Russian sneakiness to appease the powerful investigative committees
and deflect from their own profitable, but vile and socially harmful
content.

Reminiscent of the worst
days of the so-called McCarthy era, the targeted party-- in this case
the Republicans-- recoiled from the struggle for truth and tried to
out-slander the Democrats. Today, they are ranting about an obscure,
meaningless uranium deal swung by the Democrats with the wicked
Russians.

The first fruits of the
farcical Mueller Russian fishing expedition-- the Manafort
indictment-- say nothing about Russia and everything about the
corruption infecting US political practices. At best, we will
discover that Ukrainian and Russian capitalists are just as corrupt
as our own.

Other cracks in capitalist
institutions signal intractable contradictions. Both the widespread
charges of sexual impropriety in the entertainment industry and the
tensions between the players and owners in professional football are
symptoms of weaknesses in two of capitalism’s most effective
instruments of consensus. Both sports and entertainment are critical
mechanisms of distraction that dilute political engagement.

The ever-expanding charges
of sexual abuse within the giant entertainment monopolies are
spreading to other workplaces, like the government and the news
media. While the media are aggressively pursuing the prominent
actors, directors, producers, government officials, and other high
profile suspects, they wittingly ignore the contradiction that
underlies these offenses. In most cases, the malignant behavior grows
out of the power asymmetry of employer to employee. Invariably, in
these instances, the employee’s reluctance to resist, to come
forward, to fight back springs from the fear of retaliation, loss of
employment, blacklisting, etc. In other words, it is not akin to
other sexual abuses that come from misuse of physical power. Instead,
these crimes are possible because of economic power, the power
afforded by capitalist economic relations. Indeed, these crimes and
similar exercises of employer power exist in many more workplaces and
far beyond the world of celebrities. Of course, the corporate media
are unwilling to explore the general question of employer abuse that
extends beyond celebrities to millions of powerless victims.

Similarly, the conflict
over standing for the national anthem is a battle between employees--
admittedly among the highest paid in the world-- and their employers,
the owners of the professional football teams. When Houston Texans
owner Robert C. McNair called the players “inmates” it was a not
too subtle, vulgar reminder to the players that they are subservient
to the owners. What emerged as a legitimate protest against the
blacklisting of quarterback Colin Kaepernick has been reshaped by
management into a battle over workplace rights and the terms and
conditions of employment, a fundamental class contradiction.

Who Rules the World?

As long as capitalism has
existed in its mature, monopoly form, it has demonstrated an
inherent, relentless global predatory tendency, a form of
exploitation that Lenin dubbed “imperialism.” For most of the
twentieth century, imperialist governments were obsessed with
smashing the leading anti-imperialist force, the socialist countries,
while, at the same time, maintaining-- often with force-- colonial
and neo-colonial relations with other nations and nation-states.
Thus, the leading contradiction of that era was the opposition
between the socialist community, along with its allies in the
national liberation movements, and its capitalist adversaries (most
often led by the US) and their military blocs (NATO, SEATO, etc.). In
mid-century, the capitalist offensive took the virulent form of
fascism.

With the demise of the
Soviet Union and the dissolution of the socialist community, the US
and its most powerful allies declared global victory. Far too much of
the unanchored left accepted this declaration, failing to see the
various and varied resistance to US and capitalist hegemony springing
up throughout the world as fundamentally and objectively
anti-imperialist. Far too many disillusioned leftists retreated to
vague, moralistic, and decidedly class-blind notions of human rights
or humanitarianism, a “leftism” that squared all too neatly and
conveniently with the decidedly self-serving concept of “humanitarian
interventionism” concocted by the ideologues of imperialism.

But what many foresaw as
an “American 21st Century” proved to be an illusion. The basic
contradiction between the US and anti-imperialist forces of
resistance and independence and the historic contradiction between US
imperialism and its imperialist rivals operate as profoundly as they
have at any time in the history of imperialism. The dream of “Pax
Americana” dissolved before endless wars and aggressions and the
emergence of renewed, new, and undaunted oppositional centers of
power.

The long-standing
Israeli-US strategy of goading and supporting anti-secular,
anti-socialist, and anti-democratic movements in emerging nations,
especially in predominantly Islamic nations, has failed, even
backfired. Though recruited to stifle anti-capitalist movements,
these politically backward forces have turned on their masters to
stand against occupation and aggression.

The imperialist reaction
to these developments has left failed states, environmental disaster,
economic chaos, and disastrous conflict in its wake.

In addition, US and NATO
destruction has generated a refugee crisis of monumental proportions,
flooding the European Union with immigrants and fueling both a surge
of anti-immigrant sentiment and the ensuing growth of nationalist
politics. Anti-EU and anti-US sentiment grow accordingly.

While the US has not lost
its ability to wreak havoc and destruction, it has clearly failed to
secure the stability that it had long sought in order to cement the
global capitalist order.

Indeed, there are
significant sectors of the ruling class that now benefit from the
chaos. The military-industrial sector is undergoing a dramatic
revival of production and arms sales thanks to the fear and chaos
stoked since the end of the Cold War, particularly with newly
invented fears of Russian design and aggression along with constantly rising tensions.

The US energy sector,
revitalized by new technologies, is now looking to wrestle markets
from their traditional suppliers. Many of the sanctions against
Russia and the isolation of Qatar and Iran are about capturing
natural gas markets in Europe. In this regard, US capitalism benefits
from instability and hostility in the Middle East and Africa, where
volatility in energy production can only redound to the more stable
US suppliers, protected by US military might. The conflict in
Nigeria, continued chaos in Libya, the tension between former Iraqi
and Kurdish allies, the confounding and disruptive moves by the
traditionally staid Saudis, the destabilizing of Venezuela, and, of
course, the sanction war with Russia all advantage US energy
production.

This contradiction between
the post-Cold War avuncular role of the US in guaranteeing the
pathways toward global corporate profits and the contrary role of
accepting a multi-polar world and forging US policy solely to
advantage US capitalism is intensifying. It is a product of the
failure of the US to impose what Kautsky (1914) called
“ultra-imperialism,” the illusion of collaborative imperialism.

By employing the Marxist
conceptual tool of “contradiction,” we are afforded a coherent
picture of the crisis facing the capitalist order, particularly in
the US. The picture is revealed to be one impervious to the
theoretical programs (or anti-programs) favored by the social
democrats or anarchists who dominate the US left (and much of the
European left). Without a revolutionary left, the forthcoming debates
will only be between defending the idealized “peaceful” global
order of a stable, regulated capitalism or those salvaging an
inward-looking, vulgar nationalism; it will only be between those
dreaming of a mythical kingdom of class harmony with a generous net
to capture the most disadvantaged and those leaving fate to market
forces. All are roads that have long proved to be dead ends.

The intensifying
contradictions of capitalism call for another option: a revolutionary
movement for socialism.

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

University
of Chicago professor Richard Thaler won the 2017 Nobel Prize in
economics for telling economists something that everyone else already
knew. One of the pioneers of what has come to be called “behavioral
economics,” Thaler has put forward the earthshaking, profound claim
that people do not always, or consistently, act rationally.

Now
why would this seemingly commonsensical observation deserve a Nobel
Prize? Why would anyone believe otherwise?

Until
the catastrophic collapse of the global economy in 2007-2008, a
significant portion of US academic social sciences was constructed on
the assumption that public, political, and economic behavior could be
understood through the prism of individual self-interest and the
presumption of rational choice. Though the crash cast a shadow over
the absolute dominance of that assumption in the field of economics,
it remains the methodological pillar of great swaths of social
scientific research today. The crisis was a much needed reminder of
the folly of investing “rationality” in economic life.

Thaler’s
Nobel recognition will put little more than a dent in the
long-reigning ideological disposition to see the individual as
fundamental to scientific analysis, along with the individual’s
self-acquired interests and rationally-determined goals.
Anglo-American social scientists will continue to embrace individual
rational choice as the centerpiece of their explanatory framework, as
the fundamental building blocks for understanding human behavior.

The
Story Behind the Story

The
idea of the importance of individuals, interests, and reason in
explaining human action is not a new one. Aristotle’s conceptual
model-- the practical syllogism-- sought to expose the logic of human
action, basing it upon individual ends or desires and the knowledge
of how to attain those ends and desires. But Aristotle did not
believe that reason and interests determined human action with the
force of logic. Instead, he wondered why, in real experience, they
did not
produce the expected results, why people acted differently from what
was, in fact, their best interests. He was convinced that individual
self-interest, reason, and knowledge were not sufficient to explain
how people behaved. The break in the chain of goal-setting and
deliberation was, he surmised, weakness of the will (ἀκρασία).
In this regard, Aristotle anticipated Thaler by over two thousand
years.

With
the ascendancy of capitalism and its ideological superstructure, the
role of individuals, reason, and self-interest took on a new
importance. At the heart of the capitalist world view is the notion
that the individual
should have the opportunity to place satisfaction of his or her wants
at the center of her or his world and enjoy the opportunity to strive
to realize those goals without the restraint of others (what came to
be today’s popular, uncritically embraced concept of freedom).
The centrality of rights-talk in the modern era follows inexorably.

At
the same time, the capitalist world view required a social
component to protect and promote the opportunities afforded to
individuals. Individuals cannot pursue every whim without denying
some of the whims of others. Conflict would necessarily follow if
everyone pursued goals with no consideration of others.

On
the face of it, the two ideas-- individual freedom and social
constraint-- collide, since one person’s intended actions may,
indeed likely will, intersect with the realization of another’s
intended action. Hence, it would appear that guaranteeing freedom of
action in the particular is not always compatible with guaranteeing
everyone the same freedom of action at the same time.
Everyone can’t go through the same
door at the same time; someone’s freedom of action must cede to the
freedom of others.

Reconciling
individual freedoms became the great challenge for thinkers in the
capitalist era. The solution, exemplified canonically by the work of
Hobbes, sought to resolve the conflict between clashing “freedoms”
through the mechanism of a contract,
agreement,
or constitution.
Reaching into the toolbox of rationality, defenders of the capitalist
ethos argued that rational individuals would see that it was
obviously in each and every person’s best interest to accept
constraints on individual actions. People would recognize that it was
reasonable to surrender complete autonomy to a common good. Thus, the
consent of individuals to forego some freedom of action would serve
as the bridge between individual choices and the common or general
will, between the individual and the social. It would be possible to
both avoid the anarchy of unrestrained freedom and to create a civil
society, while retaining individualism, rationality, and the core of
freedom as much as would be reasonably possible.

While
this defense of the capitalist world view raises as many questions as
it answers, it met its greatest challenge from the rise of the
workers’ movement and the clash of classes. The challenge was best
articulated in the work of Marx and Engels. They argued that
individual interests and collective or common interests are
qualitatively different. They saw classes as having interests over
and above individual interests taken alone or in the aggregate. Thus,
it is possible for most workers to believe individually that it is in
the interest of each and every one of them to sign a labor contract
and work in a privately owned coal mine under barely tolerable
conditions while it is true that it is in their interest as
a class to overthrow the private
ownership of that mine and not accept the contract.

How
could both be true?

Marx
and Engels maintained that from the class perspective, from the
perspective of the working class as a social whole, the elimination
of the wage system and private ownership of the means of production
represents the true interest of the workers. Or, if you like, there
is a contradiction between the interests of the workers as
individuals and as
a class.

This
claim is not dissimilar to the classic tenet of informal logic, the
fallacy of composition: properties ascribable to each individual in a
class of individuals cannot be necessarily ascribed to the class
itself; properties of the parts are not transferred as properties to
the whole. For example, most of the poor people in the world may be
hungry, but the class of poor people
is not, in any proper sense, hungry.

The
intellectual defenders of capitalism seek to place shared rational
choice (a fictitious “vote”) at the center of its explanation of
civil society, of the legal, moral, and political edifice
consensually constructed to promote individual freedom. Marxists, on
the other hand, argue that individual consensus cannot exhaustively
account for class interests and the ensuing action and interactions
of classes. The realm of the social is, in important ways, autonomous
from the realm of the individual. Bourgeois social thinking, grounded
in the individual, leaves a host of social phenomena untouched,
unexplained.

However,
it is not the logical divide between the personal and the social, the
gulf between the individual interests and class interests alone that
challenges the worldview erected from individualism, self-interest,
and rationality. The two centuries following the rise of industrial
capitalism saw a growth and development of the working-class ideology
with Marxism at its core.

In
the aftermath of the Second World War and the Chinese Revolution, the
capitalist world view lost its luster as more and more people in more
and more places seriously considered the socialist option. Newborn
countries freed from the colonial yoke considered socialist
development as an alternative to the course recommended by their
former colonial masters. The Marxist method that gave priority to
class in social analysis found new adherents worldwide. The momentum
of Communism threw capitalism into a panic, not only in politics, but
in ideology as well.

Foundations
and think tanks mounted a war on the growing credibility of the
socialist option. Thinkers began to work feverishly to meet the
challenge of shoring up the capitalist ideology against the success
of class analysis.

As
S.M. Amadae demonstrates in her brilliant book Rationalizing
Capitalist Democracy: The Cold War Origins of Rational Choice
Liberalism (2006), much of the new
thinking to legitimize capitalism sprung from Ford Foundation
support, along with the RAND corporation and its stable of hired guns
(the Ford Foundation played a similar role in supporting the effort
on the cultural front as Frances Stoner Saunders documents in her
equally impressive book, The Cultural
Cold War).

While
Amadae is no advocate of socialism, she clearly sees the construction
of a scientifically credible theory as an increasingly urgent and
conscious effort to arm the capitalist West ideologically against
socialism’s growing popularity. Her careful research shows the
commitment to re-found anti-Marxist social science on the rock of
rational choice theory and its close variants.

Rather
than accept the existence of an explanatory framework that goes
beyond a universe of individuals, rationality, and narrow interests,
the new thinking, as embodied in the pioneering work of Nobel
laureate Kenneth Arrow, simply denies that there is any coherent
social choice beyond individual choice.

The
Arrow argument exhibits an interesting turn.

Arrow
demonstrates (1951) mathematically that it is impossible (“the
impossibility theorem”) for the rational choice calculus to
generate coherent collective preferences from individual preferences.
For Arrow, this result supports a skepticism about social goals
expressed as collective preferences. While the import of Arrow’s
findings might have generated a healthy debate, the elevated emotions
of the Cold War era and the ideological needs of the anti-Communist
academy promoted the theory-- rational choice theory-- to the head of
the class. A theory that “rigorously” dismissed the
intelligibility of class interests was too valuable to subject to
serious scrutiny.

One
might have equally and reasonably objected that any theory that could
not account for collective preferences was theoretically defective.
One could turn the tables and argue, as Marx would undoubtedly have,
that collectives, social phenomena were as real, as objective as
individuals. So, a calculus that could not explain class interests
was theoretically “skinny;” foundations built on individuals,
self-interest, and rationality alone were not sufficiently robust to
serve as a foundation for the social sciences. If rational choice
theory cannot account for collective preferences, then jettison
rational choice theory! But in those feverish times, Western
academia-- bourgeois social science-- would not countenance this
reductio ad absurdum
argument.

From
the Arrow moment, rational choice theory spread quickly to other
social sciences. Nobel laureates followed in its wake. This theory
and its variants served as a basis for “grounding American
capitalist democracy. In its guise as ‘objective’ or ‘value
free’ social science, it is difficult to appreciate the full import
of social choice, public choice, and positive political theory for
reconceptualizing the basic building blocks of political liberalism.
In light of the Cold War ideological struggle against the Soviets,
this enterprise of securing the philosophical basis of free world
institutions was critical,” in the words of S. M. Amadae.

Rational
choice theory has penetrated deeply into the pores of social science,
especially in economics and especially in the US. Its methodological
ascendance has established it as a gatekeeper against the inroads of
Marxism in Western social theory. Ironically, it has even penetrated
into Western Marxism under the guise of “Analytic Marxism;”
scholars trained in rational choice theory drew the conclusion that
methodological individualism, self-interest, and rationality were
incompatible with major tenets of Marxism-- a surprising conclusion
to all but Marxists!

The
struggle for a new politics based on the rejection of the dominant
capitalist ideology cannot be won without critically addressing the
failings of rational choice theory. A revolutionary socialist
ideology must confront it directly. It has left much of the social
sciences in the US a barren, but ideologically pure apologist for
capitalism. It contaminates public policy, justifying the explosion
of inequality and the obsession with public sector austerity.

Professor
Thaler’s award acknowledges its failings in a small way, but leaves
the dogma intact.